Restaurant Marketing 101: Google Analytics

Restaurant marketing has always been a combination of art and science and never more so that right now. If you’re looking to understand where your customers come from, one of the best tools in the business is Google Analytics. It’s completely free and if as a restaurant owner you’re not digging into these, or having someone do so for you, then you are missing a great method for understanding your client base. It does come with its own language though, so here’s our quick guide to what all those terms actually mean.

Account — where each property lives in your dashboard. You can set up multiple properties in one account or have multiple accounts for different properties

Property — the website or mobile app you want to track

Tracking ID — a unique code added to your site that allows Google Analytics to track it

Conversion — visits that turn into customers or potential customers

Channel/Traffic source — shows where your traffic came from, such as referrals or links from other sites, search engines, social media and emails

Session duration — how long visitors spend on your site

Bounce rate — percentage of visitors that view only a single page and then leave

Event — specific visitor behavior, such as when a visitor clicks on an ad, watches or stops a video, downloads a file and more

Landing page — the first page a visitor sees when visiting your website

Organic search — visitors who visit your site from a link on a search results page

Segment — a way to filter data, such as by category and types of visitors

Key Report Types:

Acquisition — shows you where traffic comes from, such as search engines, social media, email marketing campaigns and links from other websites. You’ll find this under the Acquisition tab.

Keywords — tells you what search words visitors used to find your website on a search engine. You’ll find this report in the Behavior tab, under Site Search.

Conversions — tracks how many visitors are converting into newsletter subscribers, shoppers and actual customers. Click on the Conversions tab and choose a type or category of conversion to view a report.

Lifetime value — currently in beta, Lifetime Value reports track visitors throughout their lifetime, from their first visit to conversions, return visits, future purchases and beyond. This can help you figure out what turned these visitors into customers and what made them keep coming back so you can implement changes. Lifetime value is located under the Audience tab.

Landing page — shows you which pages are the most frequent landing pages so you can track down where those visitors are coming from and what’s working on those top pages that’s attracting customers. You’ll find this across different reports under the landing page column.

Active users — monitors how many visitors are actually active on your site within a specific time period, such as the past week, 14 days or month. This will show you what pages the most active users are visiting so you can figure out what’s keeping their attention and apply it to the rest of your website. You can find the active users report in the Audience tab under Active Users.

So that’s it – you are now officially on your way to understanding your customer’s journey that little bit better! Want to know more? Get in touch, this is definitely our sort of thing…